


The Only Place That's Real

by Snickfic



Category: Christmas Cottage - Thomas Kinkade (Painting)
Genre: Crueltide, Gen, Horror, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:42:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28162632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Every so often someone would come through the village, looking for the cottage. This time it was a man in a fine silk suit and a faraway look in his eyes.
Comments: 62
Kudos: 100
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Only Place That's Real

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



> Kinkade painted multiple pieces with this name! [Here's](http://www.thomaskinkadeusa.com/images/large/christmas-cottage_4.jpg) one and [here's](https://thomaskinkade.com/wp-content/themes/TKinkade/images/image.php?src=https://thomaskinkade.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/xmcott.jpg&w=535&h=407&zc=3) another.

Ethel at the corner store recognized the man as soon as he walked in, though she’d never seen him before. She knew him by his sharp-pressed felt hat and his suit that seemed to fit him just exactly right, like her Tommy’s suits never did. He was good-looking, too, in a clean-shaven, big-city way.

And he was lost. That was the most important thing. It was in his eyes, a faraway look that he must have brought with him, a wistfulness that stole over him long before he came to Ethel’s little town. He looked around her store like where he came from, they didn’t keep the nails and wrenches just a couple aisles over from the ice cream bar. Ethel supposed they probably didn’t.

He asked for the Miller house. He had a nice voice, a baritone that Ethel’s sister would’ve loved for the community choir. 

“I don’t know any Millers,” Ethel said. “Maybe you’d better tell me what the place looks like.”

The name was always different. The description depended on the day. Sometimes the house had gables peeking through a thatched roof, a heavy stone wall with a wrought-iron gate swung open to invite the weary traveler in. This man was looking for a pretty clapboard place set back in the trees with a porch fit to put a rocking chair on, with a chimney big and sturdy as an old oak tree and a stone path leading through the snow, right up to the front steps.

Do you know it, he asked. Can you tell me the way.

Ethel paused just a moment, barely a breath, just long enough to remind herself of later. Then she told him.

* * *

Hank was shoveling snow when the man came down the sidewalk. The man wore city-slicker shoes, the kind that’d slip on ice quicker than you could blink. Good thing for him Hank had already scattered salt.

Can you tell me the way to the Miller house, the man said. 

The proprietress of the corner store, she’d told him it was this way, but he thought he’d gotten turned around somehow. He’d walked so far. He’d been looking for so long.

Hank didn’t pause, like Ethel had. She could afford to care about city folk, those that she could sell things to, but Hank was in the business of growing things from God’s own earth. He wore insulated coveralls and boots that’d keep him dry through anything, and he didn’t give a shit about this grayed-out, paper-thin man. He pointed down the road. “Just keep walking. You come along to it. See you get there before dark,” he added, and didn’t know why he did.

* * *

Meredith watched the man from beneath the fir tree at the corner her family’s long, long drive made with the road. She went to school sometimes, when she was of a mind to; she hadn’t today. She wrapped herself in a well-worn coat and peered through the branches as the man turned and turned again. Daylight hung low in the winter sky, dropping lower all the time. 

“It’s that way,” Meredith called. She came just far enough out from the low-flung branches to point.

The house, said the man. 

Meredith could barely hear his voice, though the chill breeze from earlier had fallen still. He looked barely there at all, like he was only the idea of a person. That was how Meredith knew who he was, just from looking: he looked like he’d already gone inside.

Have you been there, asked the man. Do you know what I’ll find there. Do you know if they’ll take me in.

“Guess they’ll take anyone,” Meredith said. She wasn’t altogether sure it was true. If _she_ went into the house down the lane—

But she never would. She’d never be fool enough to.

She’d always be a _little_ bit of a fool, though. That’s how her mama told it. “I’ll show you the way,” she said, and came out from under the snow-laden tree.

* * *

Meredith had a lot of questions for the man in the city-bought hat. It was not an enlightening conversation. 

“Where’d you come from?” she asked, kicking a snow drift.

Somewhere else, said the man. I don’t remember. It was dirtier than here. People exchanged metal tokens and scraps of paper. I did it, too. I don’t know why.

They had money in the village, too. Meredith didn’t point that out. “Did you come on the train?”

I might have, said the man. Maybe I did. Are trains loud? Do they smell of exhaust and industry? I might have done.

“How’d you come this far, if you didn’t know the way?”

The man smiled a serene, white-lipped smile—like a saint in a stained-glass window, Meredith thought. Like a martyr in her Sunday school text, though Meredith reckoned she knew enough of holiness to know there was none of it in that house. 

He smiled gently down upon her and said, I found new friends to help me, or I’d never have gotten here.

A chill fought to slip down Meredith’s spine, but her coat was heavy and warm, no matter how weathered, and she wasn’t easily impressed. “What do you want with the house?” 

He said, I want to go home. I’ve never been there before. 

Inside her flannel-lined coat, Meredith shivered.

* * *

Even from the road, the house shone bright and warm under the graying twilit sky. Meredith and the man stood at the very edge of the paved stone path—cleared, like Hank Jenkins in town had come out and shoveled it clean himself—and they looked.

The man said nothing. When Meredith turned to him, she saw he had no more words. He barely had a face anymore. His hat, his patent leather shoes, his thin silk suit: they were all but gone, and what little was left of him was lit from within by a warm yellow glow.

He might have said thank you. It was hard to tell. He bowed to Meredith, and then he turned and walked slowly up the path. Meredith watched him climb the shallow wooden steps; she watched the door swing open for him. By the time he passed over the threshold, there was nothing of him left at all.

* * *

It was a woman this time. Her neck was wrapped loosely in some animal’s fur coat, and a shining feather bounced above the brim of her hat. Do you know how to find the Cartwright house, the woman asked.

Ethel rolled the till shut and said, “I don’t know any house by that name. Maybe you’d better describe it.”

End


End file.
